Noticed

This is my friend Drake. He's fifteen months old, and probably one of cutest toddlers you've ever seen, right? Maybe I'm partial, but even if I wasn't I would still think he's cute. The problem with precious baby Drake, though, is that he KNOWS he's cute. And that makes it very hard to take him in public. Wherever we are, if we walk past anyone that doesn't acknowledge his presence, he will make noises at them until they tell him how cute he is (or until we walk away). He knows he's cute, and he wants to make sure everyone else agrees. Everyone. Now we all know that not everyone in the world (especially everyone in the public library) thinks that little kids are adorable. But poor baby Drake just wants to be affirmed. He wants to feel loved. He wants to be noticed. And oh, how much I learn about myself from this precious little boy and his seemingly pointless antics. For if the truth be told, I am exactly like Drake in this. I always have been. But I hope that I won't always be.

I have never exactly been the strong, silent type, though it may appear to be so sometimes. Silence is something that is rare for me, even when I'm sleeping. I'm just loud by nature. I'm pretty sure even my thoughts are often loud, judging by the noise in my head that I can't seem to control. On the rare occasions that I am more quiet than usual, for example when I am in big group settings, my facial expressions and body language usually still speak loudly, especially to the people that know me well. And as for the strong part, well, we'll just say that is also lacking. I'm weak and needy, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. We'll just leave it at that.

The bad part about my weak and noisy status is that it causes my happiness to depend mostly on the behavior of other people. I'm addicted to approval and affirmation (in both positive and negative forms), and I'll do whatever it takes to get them. That includes letting people use and abuse me, willingly discounting my own feelings, and worst of all, trying to manipulate the people I love into loving me the way I want them to. Let me be the first to tell you, that never works. It only causes me more frustration, and causes the people I care about to stop caring.

Yes, I want to be noticed. I'll admit to that one, too. Maybe no one paid enough attention to me when I little, or maybe negative attention has always been easier to obtain for me, so I play my strengths. Either way, the point is that the people who are supposed to notice me, the people who are supposed to pay attention to me and care about me, well, they just WILL. I don't have to make them. I don't have to obsess about what they think or what I did or didn't do. I'm tired of my demeanor, my mood, and my general contentment being found in other people. That's not how it is supposed to be. I'm selling myself short. Jesus loves me, this I know, and I want that alone to be where I rest. I want to care only about pleasing HIM and gaining HIS approval for all that I am and all that I do. I want to be able to say who cares if someone else doesn't appreciate me. He does. That's all that's really going to matter in the end anyways.

I hope that I can learn to become the strong, silent type. To me, it's those people who are a picture of security. A picture of rest. While I know that in some areas I will always remain weak, I pray that I can learn to be quiet more often. Just because I'm making noise (good or bad) doesn't mean I will turn a head or get a comment. I want to be loved for who I am, and I want to be appreciated only out of that kind of love. And as for baby Drake, well, he'll figure it out. Not everyone cares how cute he is. But the good news is, the people that really count tell him so every single day. May that be enough for him, and may it also become enough for me.


(sidenote: thank you, elizabeth (and/or ellie), for the advice about being noticed. it's truth. this is where it let me.)

The Beauty Right Behind Me

This weekend we were blessed with weather that hardly ever happens. I mean, it was amazing. And tonight I got the pleasure of sitting on the second level of my back deck and watching the sun set over the huge hills in my subdivision. I truly believe that one of the most amazing things God does is paint the sunsets. He paints them so that we can sit and watch them, and remember how beautiful He is. He paints them so that when life is an unattractive struggle we still have something that takes our breath away that happens every single day.

The last three mornings I have woken up in a bed different than my own with a heavy heart. I'm pretty sure that even if I had woken up in my own bed my heart would have been heavy, but there is significance in the fact that I have been waking up in different places. You see, I'm running. And even though I recognize the fact that I'm running, I have no idea how to stop. I'm not even sure that I want to. When I get in my car to drive away from my life, and God asks me what I'm doing, I just turn the radio up louder. I'm running from the life that God has fashioned for me, because I'm convinced that I know what's best. And man am I wrong.

Change has never been something I was very good at embracing. The idea of letting go of the life I have lived for the last few years breaks my heart, because I'm convinced that life couldn't get any better than it was. God told me to move here, and He went before me and prepared this place. I have amazing roommates (even though they are walking natural disasters, they have great hearts), and I have friends that live within five minutes of me that I really do have a great time with. But I've turned my back to them and shut them out. I go out of my way to avoid having conversations with them, and it makes me nervous when I can't avoid them in situations like church. Unfortunately (or maybe, fortunately) at least one of them is very in tune with what God wants to say through her, and she cornered me in church this morning and told me that what I was doing wasn't ok. I was honest with her and told her that I didn't know what else to say other than that I was doing it on purpose, and I didn't really want to stop. She hugged me and told me that she would be patient with me, but that they weren't going to try anymore if I wasn't going to try, too. She proved it when they all left my house to go play in the park this afternoon and it was clear that I wasn't invited. Ouch.

So now I sit here tonight in the silence that happens in big huge empty houses, and I wonder if they will ever invite me in again. I hate that I made it clear that they weren't good enough to be my friends, because I'm pretty sure I was wrong. They may not be the people I have shared the last three years of my life with, but they were perfectly willing to share the next three years. The hardest misery is misery brought upon oneself, and this is my consequence for running and for my cold heart. I pray that I can learn to let them in, and I pray that I can see how blessed I am to have a group of amazing people standing in front of me and asking to be my friends. It's all a part of moving on. It's all about learning to let go.

Tonight as I returned to my empty house, I looked up and noticed the beauty of the early fall sunset. It gave me warmth within my soul to know that God would still let me glimpse something so beautiful when I am acting so ugly. I am unworthy of the beauty that God hands to me, and yet He thinks I'm worth it anyways. To know He still stands there when I'm running full speed the other way completely blows my mind. So I walk outside and stop to take a deep breath as I glance upward. I thank Him for what He gives me, and I ask Him to help my heart believe that the beauty of His best is really what IS best. The evidence is in the vibrancy of the setting sun over the hills. And oh, are the colors breathtaking.

...He has done for me

I have to admit that for about a week now, my heart has been too bitter to allow me to function properly. I spent the week in hiding, pretty much refusing much social contact. Jesus was working on my heart, and I wasn't allowing it to cause me pain. I hardened my heart. And then last night God showed up in the most unexpected way, at the most unexpected time. I had plans to hang out with a friend of mine that I have known for a while now, and yet never spent one-on-one time with before. We felt it was time, and we made a dinner date. God had bigger plans.

After we ate, we went to grab some dessert before we were going to head back to her apartment and watch a movie. As we were waiting on our dessert, we discovered that we had never really traded life stories, even though we knew bits and pieces about each other, and we thought maybe last night would be a good time for that. We both figured we could accomplish this within about half an hour. We were so wrong. As she began to talk first, I made it a point to practice my listening skills, and became very interested in what she had to say about how God had brought her to this point in her life. She definitely had some surprises for me, but it wasn't until I began to share, too, that the walls were really torn down for both of us and Jesus entered in and joined us at the picnic table we were sharing.

It wasn't until about four months ago that I realized how powerful it is when people are real. I mean the vulnerable, fearless, holding nothing back kind of real. This has never been a strong point for me, because I have major trust issues and my secrets aren't even common knowledge amongst my closest friends. But as I sat talking with this precious friend of mine last night, something in my heart was ready to just bear it all. Something in me told me that she deserved the whole story, complete with the heartaches and pain and darkness. So I shared, and I left no parts out. And as we sat and talked, I realized so much that I had never known about myself and what I've come through and how much my perspective has changed. I found myself realizing God's purposes for some of the things I have been through, and I started to see how strong He has formed my faith to be through the struggles. I was suddenly aware of how much my heart has changed, and how much I have grown. It was beautiful.

As we were nearing the end of my story, I felt compelled to talk about the search for healing that I have been on for a few months now. I often am pretty convinced that I am not the only person walking around desperate for the healing that only Jesus can bring. Last night as I found myself able to be real about my pain, it offered the freedom for my friend to do the same. And there is so much power, so much healing, in being able to share true pain with another. We were able to bring out secrets long hidden that had hardened out hearts, and made us cold. We were able to ask for healing, and find life again. We were able to ask Jesus into the dark places, even though He had been there all along. We found light. We found warmth. And we found freedom.

Tonight as I sat down to spend some time with Jesus, I was reminded of the David Crowder song "Come and Listen". I realized that last night, that was what the conversation all about. Come and listen to what Jesus has done in my life, and allow me to come and listen to what He has done in yours. We have power in our stories, because we have allowed the power of Jesus to change our hearts, change our minds, and change our perspective. Sometimes we forget this, and sometimes we don't know how far we've come or why we've been through what we've been through until we allow ourselves to be real with another, and let the walls fall down. Praise God for his sovereignty in what He allows us to walk through, praise God for healing, and praise God for freedom found only through Him.

Praise our God, for He is good.
He has done for me. He has done for you. He has done for us.